objectives become merely goals while projects turn into initiatives: some dfw edits

Go take a look at this – where someone’s drawn up the edits that between a reading and print publication of a story that seems to be a section of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, soon to be released. Quite a good idea, this, and I can’t wait to sit down and read it closely. Here’s a little bit to get you started:

Oh and here’s a recording of the initial reading… Makes me quite sad to hear, geez. “I assure you that I’m not going to look up but I’m acutely aware that you’re here.”

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Did you go to that reading Wallace gave in 1998 in MA? Never seen wit and awkwardness work together so well. His brilliance was pretty overwhelming, but you also kind of felt like he needed a hug, or something. And then afterward, apparently, he ditched the professors who wanted to take him out for drinks to play ping pong in the campus center with a bunch of students. All of which is to say, he was entirely himself, or exactly how anyone who’s read him would expect him to be. But, then, why do we all feel like we know how he would be if we met him? Why does Wallace do this to us more than any other contemporary novelist? Guess I’m still mourning more than two years later.

Anyway, it is weird, the transference. When I taught Wallace’s essay, “A Supposedly Fun Thing” last semester, my students, who are generally just way more practical and well-equipped to manage the challenges of everyday life than I am, were like: do you identify with Wallace a lot? To which I replied, I know you’re trying to make fun of me by saying that, but I can’t help but take that as maybe one of the biggest compliments I’ve ever received.

Relatedly: While I was writing my last post I spent about five to ten minutes trying to think of something to say about how I felt bad to be on the one hand expressing sadness w/r/t Wallace’s suicide, and on the other, trying to plug my book. But then I realized that maybe I didn’t actually really care about the fact that I was doing something self-promoting, I just cared that I was appearing rather blatantly to be promoting myself, and wanted to offer an apology so as to cancel out that appearance, while realizing of course that the apology was itself going to be a somewhat more complicated and cynical form of self-promotion, and then worst of all, a fairly obviously one. And for this reason–the realization of how obvious it would be, what I was doing–I decided not to write an elaborate disclaimer (like the one I’m writing now). To continue with this perverse train of thought, my book contains a couple paragraphs about how the publicity strategy for Infinite Jest eventually came to center around Wallace’s own discomfort with the publicity, which helped of course to build the mystique we all continue to subscribe to (and we’re probably not wrong to do this) of the real vulnerable human being underneath, but also expressed by, all the postmodern gimmicks in and around his books. But let’s also just remember as Wallace sometimes did that you can sort of smash through the various narcissistic doubts and actually do a good, generous, kind thing, like say teach a seminar that you’re not being paid and are not required to do, if you just stop thinking about it.

the publicity strategy for Infinite Jest eventually came to center around Wallace’s own discomfort with the publicity

Exactly. I’m thinking of writing something, eventually, about advertising and 20th century literature. Both those who were actually Ad Men and Women (two I’m seminaring on tonight, for instance, Ballard and DeLillo) and those who had internalized its demands and structures (Wallace, for instance, clearly) as well as the role that marketing plays in the book market….

But yeah, we could certainly do this self-reflexivity-cum-marketing-awareness schtick all day and night, couldn’t we?

Wow, amazing that Amazon did that. I bet just clicking that button they stuck in there automatically makes the purchase happen. The links between thinking, writing, advertising, purchasing, and consuming becomes ever tighter, don’t they? Which I guess is what your blog is all about.

There’s an article you might look at if you do end up working on the novel and advertising, which you may have seen: Constructing the Postwar Art Novel: Paul Bowles, James Laughlin, and the Making of The Sheltering Sky. Evan Brier. In PMLA. About the pub industry and marketing mechanisms and so forth. I remember finding it pretty smart.